My Career Fair

Let’s face it: this week has sucked. Before you roll your eyes, mutter “Amen,” and move on to the next article, hear me out: the one thing above all of the other usual crap that happens during a week is that this week has the Career Fair.

In and of itself, the Career Fair is a stressful time. For some of us, it is the difference between living at home while working an old high school job for the summer and experiencing a new and exciting place employed at an interesting internship. For the seniors, the direction of the rest of their lives hangs in the balance. What happens in those five hours in the SRC and the days around it can have a huge impact on our lives. Naturally, all of us feel the pressure.

However, despite the gravity of the situation, life goes on as normal around Rose-Hulman, which, I suppose, is par for the course. I have one question with regard to this: why?

Everyone understands the importance of going to information sessions, handling the Career Fair correctly, and getting and nailing interviews. Career Services has beaten that into our heads over and over again. So why aren’t we given the time to do these important things well?

Including the unchanged homework load I have had this week, I have had a lab during the hours of the Career Fair, as well as meetings during evening information sessions. I even have a friend who had a test during the Career Fair and worst of all, the professor was late to arrive and distribute it to the students, wasting even more of their valuable Career Fair time!

Not one thing has let up this week. This Thursday, I was lucky enough to land an interview and have the freedom to place it between two of my classes. I live off-campus, so after my four morning classes, I had just had just enough time to pull my car around from the commuter lot to the circle in front of the Apartments, grab my suit, change in a friend’s room, and dash over to the SRC to interview. In the 15 minutes it took for me to run inside and change, Public Safety had already ticketed my car, which I saw just in time to put me in a sour mood to go interview. That’s right: I had to pay Public Safety a $10 fee to get to my interview on time.

What I would like to see for future generations is this: the week of the Career Fair is a time where there is an orchestrated effort by faculty, staff, and clubs to give students the time it takes to really do well at the Career Fair and subsequent activities. There are other colleges that do it.

Opponents to my argument will say that despite all this needed time, Rose students still make it through the quarter alright and 99 percent of seniors still get placed in jobs. What they can’t get statistics for is how many of these students could have gotten a better job or one that they wanted more, but couldn’t because of the amount of time they could devote to getting that job wasn’t sufficient.

Most of the students at Rose are here with the intention of getting a degree and using that degree to start a career, not for the love of getting tested or learning one more day’s worth of material. I am not convinced that we are truly being allowed to fully accomplish that goal.